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In Heart of the Beast, Brad Pitt gets the sh*t beaten out of him by nature as punishment for being in Troy all those years ago. He sets out on an odyssey to return home, aided only by his trusty, PTSD-inflicted dog and plenty of misfortune.
A serviceably entertaining survival thriller that works well enough to do the trick, even if director David Ayer’s attempts to elevate the material never quite work, Heart of the Beast has Pitt playing a Special Forces veteran named James who crashes his plane deep in the Alaskan wilderness. Along with his highly trained dog Odin, he faces bears, wolves, rushing rivers, falls, countless other obstacles, and a cyclops.
Pitt is good in the lead role, properly adapting to play a grisled vet with some handy survival skills. He looks the part, and most importantly to my girlfriend, he looks like Brad Pitt. The role doesn’t demand much of the consistently underappreciated actor, but he does what he needs to do.
At a tight 100 minutes, Ayer, working from a screenplay by Cameron Alexander, makes brisk work of the action. James and Odin aren’t always in danger, but they often are–there’s always something happening, for better than worse. The short of it is, if you go into Heart of the Beast simply expecting a mindless survival thriller with a good-looking dude and his dog, it’ll work for you just fine.
That doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been better. With frequent flashbacks to war, you can tell that Ayer and Alexander were shooting for something deeper here; in reality, the flashbacks don’t do much at all. Other than showing that James and Odin faced some traumatic intensity, they do nothing to help us better understand the man or the bond with his dog. They play more like filler than substantive additions to the story.
Odin (real name: Uber) is a solid lead in his own right, though Heart of the Beast oddly doesn’t seem to lean into the fact that he’s a highly trained combat dog. We see glimmers of that, but I was expecting his training to come into play in some pivotal moments; instead, we get the same kind of “man rescues dog / dog rescues man” moments seen in other films. They’re not bad, but they’re far from unique.
Finally, Pitt really does get the sh*t beaten out of him, almost excessively. The story would have worked better had they pulled back on some of the relentless bad things that happen to James and relied more heavily on some bigger, more impressive survival sequences. It feels like Alexander had a checklist of Bad Things I Want to Happen to Brad Pitt and he wrote a story that sequentially went through each of them. Each moment is entertaining enough, but stacked together they don’t add up to anything substantive.
Heart of the Beast is fast-paced, entertaining, and at times exciting, and that’s more than what is needed for a survival film of this ilk. Still, it’s frustrating to watch a film like this and not envision the multiple missed opportunities the filmmakers had to make it much, much better. A cyclops might have helped.
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.